Top 6 Easy-to-Follow Tips to Design Your Own Company Marketing Materials

If you’ve made the decision to design the marketing materials for your own company – letterhead, business cards, logos, swing tags, brochure printing etc – but aren’t a professional designer, you have probably already spent a while staring at a blank screen! One of the great skills of logo and graphic designers is the ability to make the end product look effortless. However, the process by which these gorgeous documents come about is far from effortless. Designing your own materials can be very rewarding, enabling you to truly bring out the benefits of your product and service as well as taking more ownership of your company. So today, we give you some tips to help you get the most out of this rewarding process.– Give yourself time

Don’t plan to have your marketing materials designed two days before an upcoming trade show. It may not take a solid week to actually design them, but you’ll want to get feedback and incorporate it into the designs, check on file specs with the trade printer, and actually allow time for your things to be printed. In this case, giving yourself time means mulling over colours and concepts three weeks before you need to have something ready, designing and getting feedback the second week, and finalizing your printing services the week before material are needed.

– Go through design magazines, find inspiration

There are few designers in the world who can honestly say they don’t draw on ideas from other people in their own work. Using exact designs, colour schemes and tag lines is copying, but drawing inspiration for a wide variety of sources is not.

– Sketch your ideas

While the computer allows you to create a huge variety of visual effects, for some people the physicality of actually sketching a logo or a layout for brochure printing is a crucial part of the refinement process.

– Music!

Designing and music are intricately entwined in the mind. Unlike with writing a business letter or proposal, where the lyrics can be distracting, a completely different part of the brain is utilised in designing, and music seems to tickle it into action. It doesn’t seem to matter what type – anything that makes you feel good will work!

– Stick with classic fonts

If you have discovered any of the awesome free fonts websites on the internet, you’ll quickly lose several days just deciding on the right typeface for your logo and brochure printing. Don’t even go there! They are intriguing, but if you are new at designing and trying to work to a schedule, they will only sabotage your timetable.

– Don’t second guess yourself too much

There are a hundred little details (like the font) that you could spend weeks debating over with your own brain, as well as with colleagues. After a certain number of revisions, it is smarter to simply leave the design as it is. Don’t keep second-guessing your choice of colour, your line placement, your photos or your copywriting. Just let it go. If you want to make changes later on, it is good to maintain an ongoing list of what you would like to update about either design or wording, and do them all at a future date.

And if it all seems like too much … remember that most trade printing services offer a very economical logo and layout design service!